Paul Goldberger

For most of the nineteen-seventies, the official route map of the New York City subway system was a beautiful thing. In fact, it was more than beautiful: it was a nearly canonical piece of abstract graphic design, the work of the celebrated modernist designer Massimo Vignelli, who decided that the only way to make the spaghetti tangle of subway lines comprehensible on paper was to straighten them out. On Vignelli’s map, subway lines were enticing ribbons of color that ran straight up, straight down, or at a perfect forty-five degree diagonal.

The Vignelli map wasn’t radical—it owed a great deal to the famous London Underground map of 1933 by Henry Beck, an updated version of which is still in use. But in the quest to make the subway lines simple and clear, it distorted the shape of the city above, turning Central Park, for example, into a square. That bothered a lot of people (even though the London map has always done the same thing) and so the map was replaced, in 1979, by a subway map that more accurately reflected the geography at street level, but which is actually harder to navigate.

I don’t usually go in for reviews of buildings that aren’t yet built, since you can tell only so much from drawings and plans, and, besides, has there ever been a building that didn’t look great as a model? Still, it’s hard not to comment on the new headquarters that Apple plans to build in Cupertino, California.

With Apple’s characteristic secrecy, the company hasn’t officially released the design, or announced that the architect is Foster + Partners, the London-based firm known for its super-sleek, elegant, exquisitely detailed buildings. But images of Apple’s future home, to be built on a campus that it has taken over from Hewlett-Packard, are allovertheplace, because plans must be presented to the local authorities in Cupertino, who understandably are falling all over themselves with delight. Foster may be the best large architectural practice around today, a firm that has done remarkably well at maintaining quality even as it produces more enormous corporate, institutional, and civic buildings all over the world. The finesse of Foster’s modernism would seem a natural fit with Apple, which produces the best-designed consumer products of our time, and which has done more than any other company to inject sophisticated modern design into the mass market.

In 1959, when Jonas Salk was planning a research laboratory in La Jolla, California, he told the architect Louis I. Kahn that he wanted a building he would be proud to show Picasso. The building Kahn produced for the Salk Institute is one of the most beautiful structures in the United States—a pair of pavilions that face each other across a travertine courtyard overlooking the Pacific. The design emerged not only from Kahn’s aesthetic but also from Salk’s desire to give research scientists private, almost monastic solitude. Each senior scientist had a study set at an angle to the courtyard, so as to command a view of the sea, and slightly apart from that scientist’s laboratory, as if to suggest that the act of thinking is separate from the process of conducting scientific experiments.

You get a sense of how different things are now from the way they felt the first couple of years after 9/11 when you look back at various master plans that were proposed for rebuilding the World Trade Center site. The runner-up proposal, by a consortium of architects working under Rafael Viñoly, suggested replicating the profile of the original Twin Towers with a pair of steel skeletons. A few cultural institutions would have been inserted into the gargantuan latticework, but the real point of the structure was to evoke the buildings that were no longer there. I remember thinking that the concept looked powerful. Yet if the emotions of that time had led to its being chosen—as it almost was—we would probably now find it bizarre, and disquietingly obsessed with the past. Then, there was Norman Foster’s proposal, a pair of towers with the opposite problem: they reinterpreted the architecture of the World Trade Center with exquisite finesse, but they were all business, and left little room for commemoration.

You probably have never heard of Cherry Hill Concourse, which is one of the oddest places in Central Park. I wouldn’t quite call it one of Olmsted and Vaux’s mistakes, but let’s just say it’s not the Sheep Meadow or the Ramble, either. It’s an awkward circle just south of the lake and west of Bethesda Fountain, designed originally as a place where horse-drawn carriages could easily turn around, allowing their passengers a brief glimpse of the water. There is a fountain in the middle that is much too small to anchor the large circle, and always looks forlorn. For a long time the area was paved in asphalt and used as a parking lot. In the nineteen eighties, when the Central Park Conservancy began the long process of rescuing and restoring the park, the architect Gerald Allen designed new decorative paving that consisted of a circle of brick and bluestone around the fountain and another circle of brick and bluestone around the perimeter, keeping a wide swath of asphalt in the middle. It helped, but not enough.

The architect Louis I. Kahn’s only connection to New York City, in the minds of most people, is that he died suddenly at Pennsylvania Station, in 1974. Kahn, who was seventy-three, was probably the most admired architect in America. He had never built in New York City, but he had recently completed drawings for a memorial to Franklin Delano Roosevelt that had been commissioned for a triangular site at the southern tip of Welfare Island, in the East River, where a new town was being built. The new town went up, and Welfare Island was renamed Roosevelt Island, but the memorial faltered, a victim of the financial crisis of the nineteen-seventies.

If you want to see the future of public space in New York, don’t go to the High Line, not because it isn’t good—it is spectacularly, wonderfully, gloriously good—but because we will never again have reason to build a park atop an abandoned elevated-rail line, and it will always be a one-of-a-kind place. Go instead to the East River at the foot of Wall Street, where a two-block section of a new park, the East River Waterfront Esplanade, has just been finished. It will eventually extend for roughly a mile along the East River, beginning at the Battery and running up to Rutgers Slip north of the Manhattan Bridge, so this small park, which now runs to Maiden Lane just south of the South Street Seaport, is quite literally a preview of park design to come. (The rest of it will be finished in stages over the next two years.) It suggests that a whole new set of ideas is now driving the making of public space in New York—a lot smarter, not to say more sophisticated, than the public spaces and waterfront parks we were building a few years ago.

I once heard a prominent museum director call Zaha Hadid the Lady Gaga of architecture. Her fame as an architect owes much to her image as a flamboyant diva who produces striking, over-the-top buildings—a wild woman who makes wild things. Perhaps this is why, despite being the first woman to win the Pritzker Prize, she has had so little success in the United Kingdom, where her practice was founded, in 1980, and has been based ever since. When the British build modern things, they tend to like them cool and buttoned-up, and Hadid’s buildings are almost explosive in their energy. They look as if they could fly you to the moon.

Back in the nineteen-seventies, there was a brief flurry about a novel called “Time and Again,” by Jack Finney, in which the protagonist was able to project himself from 1970 back into the New York of 1882 by a kind of self-hypnosis, based largely on the power of his surroundings, which happened to be the Dakota apartments on Central Park West. (The Dakota wasn’t built until 1884, but let’s chalk that one up to artistic license.) So potent was the atmosphere of the Dakota that the main character, a man named Simon Morley, needed only to sit in his apartment and feel its architecture intensely to find himself thrust back to the age when the building was new. I liked the book not because it was a good novel—it wasn’t—but because I lived in the Dakota for a few years in the late seventies, and the book’s conceit was impossible to resist.

I thought of “Time and Again” when I saw Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris,” which is based on much the same conceit: the notion that if architectural surroundings are compelling enough, and you love them enough, they can bring you back to another time. In the Allen movie the man doing the time travel is an earnest young screenwriter who is awed by the artists and writers who gathered in Paris in the early decades of the twentieth century, and who sees in them a purity of artistic purpose that is missing from his own life as a Hollywood hack. A small, narrow street in Paris where there is no sign of anything having changed since the twenties serves the purpose of the Dakota, as the platform from which Gil Pender, the writer, makes his nightly journey into the past, although in this case he is propelled less by a fondness for this particular street as by a love of Paris itself.

When Tod Williams and Billie Tsien took on the assignment to design a new building for the American Folk Art Museum, on West 53rd Street, they had a nearly impossible task. It was hard to know which was tighter: the site, a townhouse-size plot squeezed between the Museum of Modern Art and midtown skyscrapers, or the museum’s budget. Williams and Tsien persevered, and crafted a façade of panels of white bronze set in a folded pattern, like monumental origami. It was a brilliant way to give the little building, which opened in 2001, a sense of weight, of gravitas, so it could hold its own among its bigger neighbors. It has always possessed a sense of dignity out of all proportion to its size.

The museum, never strong financially, has now gotten itself into such serious financial difficulty that last week it agreed to sell the building to the Museum of Modern Art. There is no telling at this point what MOMA will do with it. The narrow site meant that the building was never big enough to display folk art all that well, let alone the contemporary art that the wide, expansive galleries of MOMA are designed to accommodate. Even with Williams and Tsien’s broad, open staircase—a case of architects gamely trying to make the best of a difficult situation—the inside felt tight.